Tài liệu The languagelab library english sentence structure

This page intentionally left blank An Introduction to English Sentence Structure This outstanding resource for students offers a step-by-step, practical introduction to English syntax and syntactic principles, as developed by Chomsky over the past 15 years. Assuming little or no prior background in syntax, Andrew Radford outlines the core concepts and how they can be used to describe various aspects of English sentence structure. This is an abridged version of Radford’s major new textbook Analysing English Sentences (also published by Cambridge University Press), and will be welcomed as a handy introduction to current syntactic theory. andrew radford is Professor & Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. His recent publications include Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English (Cambridge, 2004) and English Syntax: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2004). An Introduction to English Sentence Structure ● ANDREW RADFORD University of Essex CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521516938 © Andrew Radford 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009 ISBN-13 978-0-511-50666-6 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-51693-8 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-73190-4 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Preface 1 Grammar 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 Overview Traditional grammar: Categories and functions Universal Grammar The Language Faculty Principles of Universal Grammar Parameters Parameter-setting Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 2 Structure 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 Overview Phrases Clauses Clauses containing complementisers Testing structure Structural relations and the syntax of polarity items The c-command condition on binding Bare phrase structure Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 3 Null constituents 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 Overview Null subjects Null auxiliaries Null T in finite clauses Null T in infinitive clauses Null C in finite clauses Null C in infinitive clauses Defective clauses Null determiners and quantifiers Summary page viii 1 1 1 11 15 19 22 26 30 32 33 39 39 39 44 49 51 58 62 64 66 69 70 81 81 81 86 89 94 96 101 105 108 111 v vi contents 3.11 Bibliographical background Workbook section 4 Head movement 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 Overview T-to-C movement Movement as copying and deletion V-to-T movement Head movement Auxiliary Raising Another look at negation do -support Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 5 Wh-movement 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 Overview Wh-questions Wh-movement as copying and deletion Driving wh-movement and auxiliary inversion Pied-piping of material in the domain of a wh-word Pied-piping of a superordinate preposition Long-distance wh-movement Multiple wh-questions Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 6 A-movement 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 Overview Subjects in Belfast English Idioms Argument structure and theta-roles Unaccusative predicates Passive predicates Long-distance passivisation Raising Comparing raising and control predicates Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 7 Agreement, case and A-movement 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Overview Agreement Feature Valuation Uninterpretable features and Feature Deletion 113 114 120 120 120 123 128 132 134 137 140 144 146 147 152 152 152 155 161 165 171 174 182 185 188 189 196 196 196 199 201 205 211 215 219 221 227 229 230 237 237 237 240 242 contents 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 Expletive it subjects Expletive there subjects Agreement and A-movement EPP and agreement in control infinitives EPP and person agreement in defective clauses Defective clauses with expletive subjects Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 8 Split projections 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 Overview Split CP: Force, Topic and Focus projections Split TP: Aspect and Mood projections Split VP: Transitive ergative structures Split VP: Other transitive structures Split VP: Unaccusative structures Split VP: Passive and raising structures Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section 246 251 258 261 262 267 272 274 275 279 279 279 287 292 298 304 310 313 316 317 9 Phases 323 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 323 323 327 330 334 340 346 355 359 362 363 364 Overview Phases Intransitive and defective clauses Phases and A-bar movement A-bar movement in transitive clauses Uninterpretable features and feature inheritance Independent probes Subject questions More on subextraction Summary Bibliographical background Workbook section Glossary and list of abbreviations References Index 370 410 435 vii Preface Aims This book supercedes my English Syntax book, published in 2004. Although there is much in common between the two books, it should be noted that this book contains new material and new analyses (particularly in later chapters). It has two main aims. The first is to provide an intensive introduction to recent work in syntactic theory (more particularly to how the syntactic component operates within the model of grammar assumed in recent work within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program). The second is to provide a description of a range of phenomena in English syntax, making use of Minimalist concepts and assumptions wherever possible. Key features The book is intended to be suitable both for people with only minimal grammatical knowledge, and for those who have already done quite a bit of syntax but want to know something (more) about Minimalism. It is not historicist or comparative in orientation, and does not presuppose knowledge of earlier or alternative models of grammar. It is written in an approachable style, avoiding unnecessary complexity and unexplained jargon. Each chapter contains: r r r r r r r a core text (divided up into eight sections or so) focusing on a specific topic a summary recapitulating the main points in the chapter a list of key concepts/principles introduced in the chapter a bibliographical section providing extensive references to original source material a workbook section containing two different kinds of exercise a set of model answers accompanying the exercises, together with extensive helpful hints designed to eliminate common errors students make and to help students whose native language is not English an extensive glossary and integral list of abbreviations The bibliographical background section often contains references to primary research works which are highly technical in nature, and so it would not be viii preface appropriate for students to tackle them until they have read the whole book: they are intended to provide a useful source of bibliographical information for extended essays or research projects in particular areas, rather than being essential back-up reading: indeed, the exercises in the book are designed in such a way that they can be tackled on the basis of the coursebook material alone. The glossary at the end of the book provides simple illustrations of how key technical terms are used (both theory-specific terms like EPP and traditional terms like subject): technical terms are written in bold print when they are mentioned for the first time in the main text (italics being used for highlighting particular expressions – e.g. a key word appearing in an example sentence). The glossary also contains an integrated list of abbreviations. The book is intensive and progressive in nature, which means that it starts at an elementary level but gets progressively harder as you delve further into the book. A group of students I taught an earlier version of the book to gave the following degree-of-difficulty score to each chapter on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 = very easy to 5 = very hard: ch.1 = 1.7; ch.2 = 2.2; ch.3 = 2.7; ch.4 = 2.9; ch.5 = 3.2; ch.6 = 3.4; ch.7 = 3.7; ch.8 = 4.2; ch.9 = 4.4. Successive chapters become cumulatively more complex, in that each chapter presupposes material covered in previous chapters as well as introducing new material: hence it is helpful to go back and read material from earlier chapters every so often. In some cases, analyses presented in earlier chapters are subsequently refined or revised in the light of new assumptions made in later chapters. Teaching materials For teachers adopting the book, I have developed a series of web materials (in the form of Powerpoint transparencies) designed to provide two hours’ worth of teaching material for each chapter. The relevant materials present detailed stepby-step analyses of those exercise examples which have the symbol (w) after them in the coursebook. They can be accessed at www.cambridge.org/radford Companion volume This book is being produced in parallel with a longer version entitled Analysing English Sentences: A Minimalist Approach. In this shorter version, the main text (particularly in the later chapters) is generally about a third shorter than the main text in the longer version (with the exception of chapters 1 and 6). This shorter version is aimed primarily at students whose native language is not English, and who are taking (English) syntax as a minor rather than a major course. The two books have an essentially parallel organisation into chapters and sections (though additional sections, technical discussion and bibliographial references are included in the longer version), and contain much the same exercise material. ix x preface In keeping the two books parallel in structure and organisation as far as possible, I am mindful of the comment made in a review of two earlier books which I produced in parallel longer and shorter versions (Radford 1997a and Radford 1997b) that some readers may wish to read the short version of a given chapter first, and then look at the longer version afterwards, and that this is ‘not facilitated’ if there is ‘an annoyingly large number of non-correspondences’ between the two (Ten Hacken 2001, p. 2). Accordingly, I have tried to maximise correspondence between the ‘long’ and ‘short’ versions of these two new books. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Neil Smith (of University College London) for his forebearance in patiently wading through an earlier draft of the manuscript and pointing out some of the imperfections in it, while managing to make his comments challenging and good-humoured at the same time. Thanks also go to my Essex colleague Bob Borsley for helpful comments, and to Mich` le Vincent for preparing the index. e Dedication This book is dedicated to my long-suffering wife Khadija (who has had to put up with extended periods of authorial autism) and to her family, who have always spoiled me shamefully (and done their best to indulge my every whim) whenever we visit Morocco. 1 Grammar ● Overview ● Traditional grammar: Categories and functions (1) Students protested 1.1 ● In broad terms, this book is concerned with aspects of grammar. Grammar is traditionally subdivided into two different but interrelated areas of study – morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (called morphemes), and so addresses questions such as ‘What are the component morphemes of a word like antidisestablishmentarianism, and what is the nature of the morphological operations by which they are combined together to form the overall word?’ Syntax is the study of the way in which phrases and sentences are structured out of words, and so addresses questions like ‘What is the structure of a sentence like What’s the president doing? and what is the nature of the grammatical operations by which its component words are combined together to form the overall sentence structure?’ In this chapter, we begin (in §1.2) by taking a brief look at the approach to the study of syntax taken in traditional grammar: this also provides an opportunity to introduce some useful grammatical terminology. In the remainder of the chapter, we look at the approach to syntax adopted within the theory of Universal Grammar developed by Chomsky. 1.2 ● Within traditional grammar, the syntax of a language is described in terms of a taxonomy (i.e. classificatory list) of the range of different types of syntactic structures found in the language. The central assumption underpinning syntactic analysis in traditional grammar is that phrases and sentences are built up of a series of constituents (i.e. syntactic units), each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function. Given this assumption, the task of the linguist in analysing the syntactic structure of any given type of sentence is to identify each of the constituents in the sentence, and (for each constituent) to say what category it belongs to and what function it serves. For example, in relation to the syntax of a simple sentence like: 1 2 1 grammar it would traditionally be said that the sentence consists of two constituents (the word students and the word protested), that each of these constituents belongs to a specific grammatical category (students being a plural noun and protested a past tense verb) and that each serves a specific grammatical function (students being the subject of the sentence, and protested being the predicate). The overall sentence Students protested has the categorial status of a clause which is finite in nature (by virtue of denoting an event taking place at a specific time), and has the semantic function of expressing a proposition which is declarative in force (in that it is used to make a statement rather than e.g. ask a question). Accordingly, a traditional grammar of English would tell us that the simplest type of finite declarative clause found in English is a sentence like (1), in which a nominal subject is followed by a verbal predicate. Let’s briefly look at some of the terminology used here. In traditional grammar, words are assigned to grammatical categories (called parts of speech) on the basis of their semantic properties (i.e. meaning), morphological properties (i.e. the range of different forms they have) and syntactic properties (i.e. word-order properties relating to the positions they can occupy within sentences): a set of words which belong to the same category thus have a number of semantic, morphological and syntactic properties in common. There are traditionally said to be two different types of word, namely content words/contentives (= words which have substantive lexical content) on the one hand, and function words/functors (= words which essentially serve to mark grammatical properties) on the other. The differences between the two can be illustrated by comparing a contentive like car with a functor like they. A noun like car has substantive lexical content in that it denotes an object which typically has four wheels and an engine, and it would be easy enough to draw a picture of a typical car; by contrast, a pronoun such as they has no descriptive content (e.g. you can’t draw a picture of they), but rather is a functor which simply marks grammatical (more specifically, person, number and case) properties in that it is a third person plural nominative pronoun. Because they have lexical semantic content, content words often (though not always) have antonyms (i.e. ‘opposites’) – e.g. the adjective tall has the antonym short, the verb increase has the antonym decrease, and the preposition inside has the antonym outside: by contrast, a typical function word like e.g. the pronoun me has no obvious antonym. Corresponding to these two different types of (content and function) word are two different kinds of grammatical category – namely lexical/substantive categories (= categories whose members are content words) on the one hand, and functional categories (= categories whose members are function words) on the other. Let’s begin by looking at the main lexical/substantive categories found in English – namely noun, verb, adjective, adverb and preposition (conventionally abbreviated to N, V, A, ADV and P in order to save space). Nouns (= N) are traditionally said to have the semantic property that they denote entities: so, bottle is a noun (since it denotes a type of object used to contain liquids), 1.2 Traditional grammar: Categories and functions water is a noun (since it denotes a type of liquid) and John is a noun (since it denotes a specific person). There are a number of distinct subtypes of noun: for example, a noun like chair is a count noun in that it can be counted (cf. one chair, two chairs . . .), whereas a noun like furniture is a mass noun in that it denotes an uncountable mass (hence the ungrammaticality of ∗ one furniture, ∗ two furnitures – a prefixed star/asterisk being used to indicate that an expression is ungrammatical). Likewise, a distinction is traditionally drawn between a common noun like boy (which can be modified by a determiner like the – as in The boy is lying) and a proper noun like Andrew (which cannot be used in the same way in English, as we see from the ungrammaticality of ∗ The Andrew is lying). Count nouns generally have the morphological property that they have two different forms: a singular form (like horse in one horse) used to denote a single entity, and a plural form (like horses in two horses) used to denote more than one entity. Common nouns have the syntactic property that only (an appropriate kind of) noun can be used to end a sentence such as They have no . . . In place of the dots here we could insert a singular count noun like car, or a plural count noun like friends or a mass noun like money, but not other types of word (e.g. not see or slowly or up, as these are not nouns). A second lexical/substantive category is that of verb (= V). These are traditionally said to have the semantic property that they denote actions or events: so, eat, sing, pull and resign are all (action-denoting) verbs. From a syntactic point of view, verbs have the property that only an appropriate kind of verb (in its uninflected infinitive form) can be used to complete a sentence such as They/It can . . . So, words like stay, leave, hide, die, starve and cry are all verbs and hence can be used in place of the dots here (but words like apple, under, pink and if aren’t). From a morphological point of view, regular verbs like cry in English have the property that they have four distinct forms: e.g. alongside the bare (i.e. uninflected) form cry we find the present tense form cries, the past tense/perfect participle/passive participle form cried and the progressive participle form crying. (See the Glossary of terminology at the end of this book if you are not familiar with these terms.) A third lexical/substantive category is that of adjective (= A). These are traditionally said to have the semantic property of denoting states or attributes (cf. ill, happy, tired, conscientious, red, cruel, old etc.). They have the syntactic property that they can occur after be to complete a sentence like They may be . . . (as with They may be tired/ill/happy etc.), and the further syntactic property that (if they denote a gradable property which can exist in varying degrees) they can be modified by a degree word like very/rather/somewhat (cf. She is very happy). Many (but not all) adjectives have the morphological property that they have comparative forms ending in -er and superlative forms ending in -est (cf. big/bigger/biggest). A fourth lexical/substantive category is that of adverb (= ADV). These often have the semantic property that they denote the manner in which an action is performed (as with well in She sings well). Regular adverbs have the morphological 3 4 1 grammar property that they are formed from adjectives by the addition of the suffix -ly (so that corresponding to the adjective sad we have the adverb sadly). A syntactic property of adverbs is that an adverb (like e.g. badly) is the only kind of word which could be used to end sentences such as She behaved . . ., He treats her . . . or He worded the statement . . . The fifth and final lexical/substantive category found in English is that of preposition (= P). Many of these have the semantic property of marking location (cf. in/on/off/inside/outside/under/above/below). They have the syntactic property that a preposition (with the appropriate kind of meaning) can be modified by right in the sense of ‘completely’, or by straight in the sense of ‘directly’ (as with the preposition down in He fell right down the stairs and the preposition to in He went straight to bed). Prepositions have the morphological property that they are invariable/uninflected forms (e.g. the preposition off has no past tense form ∗ offed, no superlative form ∗ offest and so on). In addition to the five lexical/substantive categories identified above, English also has a number of functional categories. One such functional category is that of determiner (= D) – a category whose members are traditionally said to include the definite article the and the demonstrative determiners this/that/these/those. They are called determiners because they have the semantic property that they determine specific semantic properties of the noun expression that they introduce, marking it as a definite referring expression: for example, an expression like the car in a sentence such as Shall we take the car? is a definite referring expression in the sense that it refers to a definite (specific) car which is assumed to be familiar to the hearer/addressee. A related class of words are those which belong to the functional category quantifier (= Q), denoting expressions of quantity, such as some/all/no/any/each/every/most/much/many. (We shall also take the indefinite article a to be a quantifier – one which quantifies over a single entity.) A further type of functional category found in English is that of pronoun (= PRN). Pronouns are items which are said to ‘stand in place of’ (the meaning of the prefix pro-) or ‘refer back to’ noun expressions. However, there are reasons to think that there are a number of different types of pronoun found in English and other languages. For example, in sentences such as John has a red car and Jim has a blue one, the word one is traditionally said to be a pronoun because it has no lexical semantic content of its own, but rather takes its content from its antecedent (i.e. one refers back to the noun car and so one is interpreted as having the same meaning as car). However, from a morphological perspective, the pronoun one behaves like a regular count noun in that it has a plural form ending in -s (as in I’ll take the green apples if you haven’t got any red ones). So, more accurately, we could say that one is an N-pronoun (or pronominal noun). By contrast, in a sentence like Many miners were rescued, but some died, the word some seems to function as a Q-pronoun (i.e. a pronominal quantifier). And in a sentence like These apples are ripe, but those aren’t, the word those seems to be a D-pronoun (i.e. a pronominal determiner). Indeed, some linguists have argued that so-called personal pronouns like I/me/we/us/you/he/him/she/her/it/they/them are also 1.2 Traditional grammar: Categories and functions D-pronouns: the rationale for this is that some such pronouns can be used as determiners which modify a following noun (as in We republicans don’t trust you democrats, where we could be argued to be a determiner modifying the noun republicans, and you could be seen as a determiner modifying the noun democrats). While, as noted here, pronouns can be argued to belong to a number of distinct types of category, in order to simplify discussion I shall simply refer to them as belonging to the category PRN throughout this book. (Because there are a number of different types of pronoun, some linguists prefer to refer to them by using the more general term proform.) Another type of functional category found in English is that of auxiliary (verb). They have the semantic property of marking grammatical properties such as tense, aspect, voice or mood (see the Glossary of terminology at the end of the book if you are not sure what these terms mean). Auxiliaries have the syntactic property that (unlike lexical/main verbs) they can be inverted with their subject in questions (so that corresponding to a statement like It is raining we have the question Is it raining? where the auxiliary is has moved in front of the subject it and is said to have been inverted). The items italicised in (2) below (in the use illustrated there) are traditionally categorised as auxiliaries taking a [bracketed] complement containing a bold-printed verb: (2) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) He has/had [gone] She is/was [staying at home] They are/were [taken away for questioning] He really does/did [say a lot] You can/could [help us] They may/might [come back] He will/would [get upset] I shall/should [return] In the uses illustrated here, have/be in (2a,b) are (perfect/progressive) aspect auxiliaries, be in (2c) is a (passive) voice auxiliary, do in (2d) is an expletive or dummy auxiliary (i.e. one with no intrinsic lexical semantic content), and can/could/may/might/will/would/shall/should in (2e–h) are modal auxiliaries. What auxiliaries in sentences like those above have in common is the fact that they inflect for present/past tense. Hence, in work in syntax over the past ten years or so, they have been said to belong to the category T (= tense-marked auxiliary). An interesting word which has been argued to be related to tense-marking auxiliaries in work over the past thirty years or so is the infinitive particle to, in sentences such as: (3) They are now expecting the president to be impeached tomorrow In a sentence like (3), infinitival to seems to have future time-reference (in that the act of impeachment will take place at some time in the future), and this is why we can use the word tomorrow in the to-clause. In this respect, infinitival to seems 5 6 1 grammar to have much the same function as the auxiliary will in They are now expecting that the president will be impeached tomorrow, suggesting that infinitival to is an infinitival tense marker, and so belongs to the same category T as present/past tense auxiliaries such as is/was. The difference between auxiliaries and infinitival to is that most auxiliaries overtly inflect for present/past tense (though this is not true of the invariable auxiliaries must and ought), whereas infinitival to is invariable in form. We can thus say that an auxiliary like will is a finite T constituent, whereas infinitival to is a nonfinite T. The last type of functional category which we will look at is a kind of word (like each of the words italicised in the examples below) which is traditionally termed a (subordinating) conjunction: (4) (a) (b) (c) I think [that you may be right] I doubt [if you can help me] I’m anxious [for you to receive the best treatment possible] Each of the bracketed clauses in (4) is a complement clause, in that it is the complement of the word immediately preceding it (think/doubt/anxious); for this reason, the italicised word which introduces each clause is known in work since the 1960s as a complementiser (= C), and this is the terminology which will be adopted throughout this book. Complementisers are functors in the sense that they encode particular sets of grammatical properties. For example, complementisers encode (non)finiteness by virtue of the fact that they are intrinsically finite or nonfinite. More specifically, the complementisers that and if are inherently finite in the sense that they can only be used to introduce a finite clause (i.e. a clause containing a present or past tense auxiliary or verb, like the present tense auxiliaries may and can in 4a and 4b); by contrast, for is an inherently infinitival complementiser, and so can be used to introduce a clause containing infinitival to (as in 4c). Moreover, that introduces a declarative clause (i.e. one which has the force of a statement), if introduces an interrogative clause (i.e. one which has the force of a question) and for introduces an irrealis clause (i.e. one relating to a hypothetical event which hasn’t yet taken place and may or may not take place at some stage in the future). Hence, we can say that is a finite declarative complementiser, if is a finite interrogative complementiser and for is an infinitival irrealis complementiser. Using the set of syntactic categories outlined above, we can employ the traditional labelled bracketing technique to categorise words (i.e. assign them to grammatical categories) in a way which describes how they are being used in a particular sentence. Using this technique, the words in sentence (5a) below can be categorised as in (5b): (5) (a) (b) The president is clearly feeling angry that Congress has refused to negotiate with him [D The] [N president] [T is] [ADV clearly] [V feeling] [A angry] [C that] [N Congress] [T has] [V refused] [T to] [V negotiate] [P with] [PRN him] 1.2 Traditional grammar: Categories and functions The labelled bracketing in (5b) tells us that the is a D/determiner, president a N/noun, is a T/present tense auxiliary, clearly an ADV/adverb, feeling a V/verb, angry an A/adjective, that a C/complementiser, Congress a N/noun, has a T/present tense auxiliary, refused a V/verb, to a T/infinitival tense particle, negotiate a V/verb, with a P/preposition and him a PRN/pronoun. The discussion of grammatical categories presented above is merely a brief sketch: however, it suffices to illustrate the point that when traditional grammarians analyse the syntax of sentences, they begin by assigning each of the words in the sentence to a grammatical category which describes how it is being used in the sentence concerned. Grammatical differences between individual words belonging to the same category are traditionally described in terms of sets of grammatical features, and these features (by convention) are enclosed in square brackets. For example, both she and us are pronouns, but they differ in that she is a third person pronoun which is feminine in gender, singular in number and nominative in case, whereas us is a first person pronoun which is plural in number and accusative in case. Accordingly, we can describe the differences between these two pronouns by saying that the pronoun she carries the features [third-person, singular-number, feminine-gender, nominative-case], whereas us carries the features [first-person, plural-number, accusative-case]. As noted at the beginning of this section, traditional grammarians are also concerned to describe the grammatical functions which words and other expressions fulfil within the sentences containing them. We can illustrate this point in terms of the following set of sentences: (6) (a) (b) (c) (d) John smokes The president smokes The president of Utopia smokes The former president of the island paradise of Utopia smokes Sentence (6a) comprises the noun John which serves the function of being the subject of the sentence (and denotes the person performing the act of smoking), and the verb smokes which serves the function of being the predicate of the sentence (and describes the act being performed). In (6a), the subject is the single noun John; but as the examples in (6b,c,d) show, the subject of a sentence can also be an (italicised) phrase like the president, or the president of Utopia or the former president of the island paradise of Utopia. Now consider the following set of sentences: (7) (a) (b) (c) (d) John smokes cigars John smokes Cuban cigars John smokes Cuban cigars imported from Havana John smokes a specific brand of Cuban cigars imported by a friend of his from Havana Sentence (7a) comprises the subject John, the predicate smokes and the complement (or direct object) cigars. (The complement cigars describes the entity on 7 8 1 grammar which the act of smoking is being performed; as this example illustrates, subjects normally precede the verb with which they are associated in English, whereas complements typically follow the verb.) The complement in (7a) is the single noun cigars; but a complement can also be a phrase: in (7b), the complement of smokes is the phrase Cuban cigars; in (7c) the complement is the phrase Cuban cigars imported from Havana; and in (7d) the complement is the phrase a specific brand of Cuban cigars imported by a friend of his from Havana. A verb which has a noun or pronoun expression as its direct object complement is traditionally said to be transitive. From a semantic perspective, subjects and complements share in common the fact that they generally represent entities directly involved in the particular action or event described by the predicate: to use the relevant semantic terminology, we can say that subjects and complements are arguments of the predicate with which they are associated. Predicates may have one or more arguments, as we see from sentences such as (8) below, where each of the bracketed nouns is a different argument of the italicised predicate: (8) (a) (b) (c) [John] resigned [John] felt [remorse] [John] sent [Mary] [flowers] A predicate like resign in (8a) which has a single argument is said to function as a one-place predicate (in the relevant use); one like feel in (8b) which has two arguments is a two-place predicate; and one like send in (8c) which has three arguments is a three-place predicate. In addition to predicates and arguments, sentences can also contain adjuncts, as we can illustrate in relation to (9) below: (9) (a) (b) The president smokes a cigar after dinner The president smokes a cigar in his office In both sentences in (9), smokes functions as a two-place predicate whose two arguments are its subject the president and its complement a cigar. But what is the function of the phrase after dinner which also occurs in (9a)? Since after dinner isn’t one of the entities directly involved in the act of smoking (i.e. it isn’t consuming or being consumed), it isn’t an argument of the predicate smoke. On the contrary, after dinner simply serves to provide additional information about the time when the smoking activity takes place. In much the same way, the italicised expression in his office in (9b) provides additional information about the location of the smoking activity. An expression which serves to provide (optional) additional information about the time or place (or manner, or purpose etc.) of an activity or event is said to serve as an adjunct. So, after dinner and in his office in (9a,b) are both adjuncts. So far, all the sentences we have looked at in (6–9) have been simple sentences which contain a single clause. However, alongside these we also find complex sentences which contain more than one clause, like (10) below: